“I thought I’d go to the library and study for our trig test. Are you going to the pep rally with Jeremy?”
Anh stood waiting beside me. I paused, trailing a finger over the letters. They felt creepy and intentional. The blue ink didn’t smudge, but I could still smell a hint of indelible marker fumes. Probably the same blue markers we used during labs. Someone must have been sitting in my seat before class and thought it’d be funny to freak me out. It wouldn’t have been the first time a classmate pulled a practical joke at my expense. This one seemed harmless enough.
Anh was still waiting. At this point, I wanted nothing more than to be as far away as possible from Mr. Rankin and the gossip-worthy morsel he’d just served up to my entire chem class. As if they didn’t already have enough to chew on. “Pep rally. Sure. See you at lunch.”
2
Jeremy waited outside my class, leaning against the wall and fiddling with his camera case, his baby-blond bangs falling limp over his eyes. He paused his tinkering to push his wirerim glasses up his nose with a long, slender finger. Someone bumped into him, and when he looked up, his pale gray eyes found mine. He smiled.
I wanted to smile back, but my mood was too dark when I walked out of Rankin’s class and I couldn’t make myself return the greeting.
“Hello, sunshine.” He tossed me a pouch of Twinkies. Jeremy’s smiles felt brighter lately. Anh insisted he only smiled now when he was with me. The simple fact that I felt responsible for them made those rare smiles feel like spotlights. And I’d already been under enough spotlights this morning.
He looked past me, over my head, and frowned. “Is Anh coming?”
“She’s studying.”
I dropped the World News section of my paper into his waiting hands, and kept the rest for myself. World news mattered to Jeremy. His world was bigger than mine. His parents owned time shares in Aruba and the Cayman Islands. I, on the other hand, never saw much sense in concerning myself with global headlines when my entire world fit inside a tin can trailer and the front seat of Jeremy’s Civic.
I handed him back a Twinkie and scarfed mine down in huge bites as I put distance between the lab and me. His camera case bounced against his chest as he tried to keep up.
“Good morning, Jeremy,” he mumbled through a mouthful of cake. “Great to see you. How was your morning? Fantastic, Nearly, thanks for asking. Hey, that’s great. Mine too.”
I flinched at the sound of my given name. Back in middle school, we’d had a writing lesson about eliminating unnecessary adverbs, and the class had latched on to my name: Nearly Boswell. I became an adverb. Expendable.
Jeremy had decided a new name would make me feel stronger. So he came up with Leigh.
Not that it had mattered. I’d gone from being “Nearly A Freak” in grade school, to “Nearly Has Boobs” in middle school, and now “Nearly Invisible” to most of West River High.
Jeremy never called me Nearly unless he wanted to make a point.
He looked me over thoughtfully. “Don’t let Rankin get to you. He’s not going to mess with your grade just because you were reading the personal ads during lab.”
“You heard that?” I glanced around to be sure no one was listening.
“Should I be jealous?” he chided. “Reading the personals used to be our thing. Since when did you start reading them with Anh?”
“How long were you standing out there? Why weren’t you in class?”
He waved a pink slip. “Excused absence. Friday morning therapy with Dr. Matthews.”
I didn’t break eye contact to double-check his excuse. He’d been seeing Dr. Matthews since he’d tried to OD on a bottle of cough syrup when he was twelve. “So why weren’t you in therapy, then?”
Jeremy fanned his fingers and a second pink slip appeared behind the first. “Excused absence. Illness.”
I gave him a quick head to toe. He definitely wasn’t sick. But he was smiling the same wide-eyed smile he wore the first day he picked me up for school, right after his father forbade him from driving his car anywhere near my neighborhood. The same reckless twinkle in his eyes he’d worn when I dragged him through the back window of my trailer on Friday nights while my mom was at work so our nosy neighbor wouldn’t see.
Normally just the thought of cutting class would have had him scrambling for a Xanax. He’d spent his whole life doing exactly what his parents expected of him—well, except for the time he spent with me. His father was wound way too tight for Jeremy to risk anything else. And yet, he was smiling—like he’d tasted his own free will, and he liked it. “How many sessions have you skipped?”